a gulp of watery ale from her wooden tankard brought strength to my dazed body.
I leaned back against the railing. We passed a small market that appeared to sell nothing but spices and herbs. Now that the rain had stopped, the sellers threw off the blankets keeping their narrow stalls dry. A rich mix of borage, sage, thyme, rosemary, parsley, and chives surged in the air, and then dissolved as we rumbled on. The urgent smells of the city rose again. A row of four-story buildings came into view—more prosperous than any I’d seen so far. The sign of the goldsmith hung from a street corner.
A young man sitting across from me grinned and said, loudly, to the whole cart, “We’re grateful to King Hal for burning a young beauty at Smithfield. Last person killed was an ugly, old forger.”
A knot of swallowed bread rose in my throat, and I covered my mouth.
“But is she a beauty?” demanded someone else.
An elderly man with milky blue eyes twisted a long hair that sprang from the middle of his chin.
“I know someone who has seen Lady Bulmer in the flesh, and yes, she is bonny,” he said slowly. “More so than the queen.”
“Which queen?” one of the men shouted.
“All three of them,” answered another. A nervous laugh raced around the cart. To mock the king’s marriages—the divorce of the first wife and the execution of the second to make way for the third—was a crime. Hands and ears had been lopped off for it.
The old man twisted his chin hair harder. “Lady Bulmer must have offended the king grievously for him to burn her out in the open before commoners, not to order the ax for Tower Hill or hang her at Tyburn.”
The young man said, “They’ve dragged all the nobles and gentry down to London, the ones who followed Robert Aske. For king’s justice. She’s just the first to die.”
My breath quickened. What would these Londoners say, what would they do to me, if they knew who I was and where I came from? One thing was certain: I would never reach Smithfield.
I searched my prayers for something to uphold me. O Lord my God, help me to be obedient without reserve, poor without servility, chaste without compromise.
“The Bulmer woman’s a foul rebel!” shouted the woman who’d shared with me her bread. “She’s a Papist northerner who plotted to overthrow our king.”
Humble without pretense, joyful without depravity, serious without affectation, active without frivolity, submissive without bitterness, truthful without duplicity.
The old man said mildly: “In the North, they gave their lives for the old ways. They wanted to protect the monasteries.”
Everyone erupted in scorn.
“Those fat monks hide pots of gold while the poor starve outside their walls.”
“I heard of a nun who had a priest’s brat.”
“The sisters are whores. Or else they’re cripples—idiots, all cast off by their families.”
I heard a ragged noise. It was my own laugh, a bitter, joyless one—and unheeded, for there was a shout just then outside the cart. An urchin ran alongside, so fast he shot ahead of our horses. A panicky look over the shoulder revealed the child to be not a boy but a smudge-faced girl, her hair chopped short.
A clod of dirt sailed through the air and hit her shoulder. “Awww,” she howled. “Ye curs!”
Two large boys, scrambling up along the side of the cart, laughed. Within a minute, they’d have her. The men in the cart cheered on the chase.
The boys’ prey darted out of the street and toward a row of shops.
Another girl beckoned from a doorway. “This way!” she shouted. The urchin darted inside, and the door slammed shut behind them. The boys reached it seconds later and pounded, but it was locked.
I closed my eyes. A different girl was running. Eight years old, breathless, a stitch in my side, I charged down a narrow path between tall hedges of yew, searching for a way out.
I could hear people calling my name, but I couldn’t see them. “Hurry, Joanna, hurry—we’re to play tennis next!” shouted my boy cousins, so strong, so hard. “Come now, girl, you can manage it,” boomed the careless voice of my uncle, Edward Stafford, third Duke of Buckingham and head of the family. “You must find your own way out. We can’t send anyone after you and risk the loss of another child.”
I was trapped in my uncle’s maze. He’d just had it built—“I hired better monks to design mine than Cardinal Wolsey used,” he said again